Confidence in Cornwall housing market appears steady

The site of a new townhouse subdivision located at the corner of Third Street and Bedford Street on Tuesday June 18, 2019 in Cornwall, Ont. Alan S. Hale/Cornwall Standard-Freeholder/Postmedia NetworkAlan S. Hale / Alan S. Hale/Standard-Freeholder

Pending council approval later this month, Cornwall will have given permission to developers to add 151 new homes to the city in the coming years.

Aside all the chatter and clutter in discussions on the city’s future, this has to be seen as a positive step for our city.

Three developers, all of whom appear to be local, have done their homework and determined the city’s housing market is stable and solid enough for them to proceed with their plans to build two new subdivisions and almost double an existing one.

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The largest, which is the application by Cartwave Realty Ltd. to almost double the size of the Bellwood Estates development, shows a developer wanting to be prepared to be able to build to suit expected demand for new homes in the city. Which means that sales and construction of units in the first three phases of the overall development must be going well enough to give the company this confidence.

That expansion alone, if approved later this month, would bring an additional 80 residential units to Cornwall. The other two, approved by council in July, added the potential for another 71 units.

To put this into perspective, the timeline from when a developer comes to the planning advisory and hearing committee, then city council, for approval and starts construction is more often than not measured in years, not months. But then, it’s also reasonable most businesses also do their forecasting in years, not months.

Sometimes, the confidence of today doesn’t necessarily translate into construction tomorrow. That these developers have accepted that risk is a sign of confidence.

Collectively, these show the patterns of the past few years will hold steady— which is somewhere between 100 and 150 new homes being finished in each calendar year. We know they won’t all be single-family detached homes, but this is a good thing.

In order to attract new residents from a variety of income levels and continue to expand the variety of housing available to all of us, there needs to continue to be variety in the new housing stock coming online.

These new approvals have come in a time when there has been some opposition among local builders to the introduction of development charges and increases and changes to the fee structures for building permits.

Some warned these would be a drag on continued development in Cornwall.

These three recent applications suggest otherwise— which serves as another sign those decisions were tolerable and appropriate.